[Prism54-users] Re: [Prism54-devel] Prism54 development update

[Sebastien]

> > I agree that WEP/AES in firmware for bulk data may make some difference
> > and may make sense, other things would not.

Moreover, the ISL3880/3886/3887 chips seem to include a RC4 and AES hardware 
accelerators. Seems located in the 0xc0000500 memory area, by the way. But 
there are more urgent things to reverse engineer for now.

> > Do you seriously expect using CPU for sending 10 beacons per second
> > will even be visible in you favorite system load meter?

Making them sent automatically by the firmware will be rather trivial anyway, 
once the radio and timers are reverse engineered.

> But I still think that at least
> everything, that can be done in firmware without any feature loss or
> limit should be done in firmware.

Yes - don't waste this 30MHz ARM946E that every ISL38xx embeds.
Moreover, now that GCC can compile a firmware, it won't be more complicated to 
implement something in firmware than it is in the host, as far as no 
proprietary hardware acceleration is involved (ie. RC4/AES).

> Other things will surely need additional discussion how far it makes
> sense or not to integrate them in the firmware, but that's too far away
> at the moment to discuss it the way it should be.

I agree. And don't forget that on a SoftMAC chip, the memory capacity is 
really limited. I think that's what will tell what's going to be done by the 
host and by the firmware.

Regards,
Sebastien